Synchronicity

"Meaningful coincidences", "significantly related patterns of chance", "an acausal connecting principle?" - the psychologist Carl Jung introduced the notion of synchronicity to describe those striking and apparently inexplicable occurrences when, for example, the contents of a dream are paralleled in a pattern of seemingly unconnected external events. Synchronicities sometimes occur when people are in times of crisis or change, in love, engaged in highly creative work or on the verge of a breakdown. They are moments when the boundaries of mind and matter are transcended and so escape the distinctions we normally make between inner/outer, subjective/objective, psyche/matter. They suggest the existence of patterns that embrace both mental and physical worlds. Indeed Jung invented another word, the psychoid, to describe that level which lies beyond matter and mind and contains them both. Another useful metaphor is that of the speculum, as a mirror that reflects one world into another, yet belongs to neither.

The physicist Wolfgang Pauli appears to have engaged in discussions with Jung on the topic of synchronicity. Pauli's dreams also form a significant aspect of Jung's "Psychology and Alchemy". The culmination of Pauli's remarkable series of dreams was his vision of The World Clock. This clock contains two discs, mounted at right angles to each other and rotating about a common axis. While such an axis exists within the logic of a dream it can have no actual existence in our physical three-dimensional space! Again it is an axis which connects to different patterns of movement, yet transcends the dimensional limitations of either.

In his investigation of synchronicity Peat distinguished between purely chance events that have little significance within a person's life and much deeper and more meaningful occurrences. In this he drew attention to the resemblances between synchronicity and James Joyce's notion of Epiphany - special moments of illumination.

Peat's book Synchronicity: The Bridge Between Matter and Mind discusses the history of synchronicity, and the relationship between Jung and the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and attempts to further this liaison between psychology and physics. In addition to several essays on the topic of synchronicity Peat is now considering a totally new version of his book. (See Work-In-Progress)